Comfortable Disorientation

Men, emotions, truthiness

Scamp's post about David Beckham and emotion in advertising reminded me of how much I like Sam Taylor-Wood's Crying Men photographs:  real men showing vulnerable emotions - but they're actors, so how much is performance and how much is genuine?

This in turn reminded me of this video and sent me scurrying to Youtube in search of it.

Now, however you feel about Elton John, his music and his personal style, you have to admit the man can write a damn fine wonky love song. So we have his music, lyrics and vocals combined with stark, spare direction from Taylor-Wood and a fitting performance by Robert Downey Jr. Again you know and can see that he is acting, but the package fits my concept of RDJ so well that I believe (or want to believe) that it's true. 

It probably goes without saying I'm a fan of RDJ. There's no denying he's easy on the eye. But it's the archetype he represents that I find so compelling. The combination of impossibly-talented and deeply-flawed; someone who is at once couldn't-give-a-fuck and love-me-please. (see also Robbie Williams). 

Faked-reality fiction

Towards the end of last year, I read the following three things:

• This Wired article about the whole lonelygirl15 thing. Which prompted me to go and watch some of the films in this series (I realise I'm rather behind the times here - but better late than never!)
• This Amazon-review blog that Richard directed me to at a coffee morning back in November.  It's a blog by Simon, a fictional character who writes reviews on Amazon revealing his own story in the process
• Diary of an Ordinary Woman a novel by Margaret Forster. The author is known for writing biographies and this book is presented as real with a fictional foreword by the author explaining how she came into contact with Millicent King's diaries

All three are works of fiction that use devices normally associated with reality to tell their story. 

Reading (or watching) them can be a strange experience, your senses and intellect are confused -you know they're not real, yet feel that they are. This creates a slipping feeling, like being between gears, moving between reality and unreality while trying to hold them both in place at the same time.  The feeling itself is interesting, I find it strangely compelling.

It's not always positive though, sometimes it makes us angry because we feel manipulated.  How we feel about it depends on how well it's done (the quality of the story, the appeal of the character(s), the cleverness and mastery of the device). It also depends on the intention - there's no problem if it's a creative attempt to entertain, however if it turns out to be a ploy to attract our attention to something we wouldn't otherwise be interested in we can be left feeling cynical and ticked off.

There's a tense excitement about pushing the boundaries between what is real and what is not - at what point does it go too far? Is it ok as long as people know it's meant to be fiction and not if they don't? Where does acceptable, natural editing of events end and complete fabrication begin? (the furore around James Frey's A Million Little Pieces is worth mentioning here - it remains my favourite rehab-memoir despite the fact that significant chunks of it were made up).   

I don't have (or want) answers, I just like the fact that fake-reality fiction exists and that web 2.0 is creating more and more opportunities to play in this area.